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Mayoral candidate Karen Stintz wants to sell 10 per cent of Toronto Hydro, or lease out the lucrative electricity monopoly, and devote the proceeds to transit expansion.

Rival John Tory warns of a “fire sale.”

Councillor Stintz revealed the Hydro proposal in a Wednesday speech to a business audience at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, her first formal address since she launched her campaign on Monday.

Stintz touted her pro-outsourcing record as TTC chair from 2010 to last week. She’d focus on “better but affordable service,” as she said she did at the TTC, and pledged to tackle traffic congestion as her top priority.

“Let’s face it: is there really anything more frustrating than being stuck in traffic, whether you’re on a streetcar or a car or a bike?” Stintz said. “It robs us of important time, important time we could be spending with our families and friends, with our kids at the dinner table, at our sons’ or daughters’ hockey games or soccer matches. I get it.”

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She said she would appoint a single “czar” to be responsible for all transportation issues. The TTC’s chief executive, the city’s transportation chief and other bureaucrats would report to that person.

Stintz peppered the speech with personal flourishes, speaking about her young son and daughter and saying she is first and foremost “Karen Stintz, mom.” She also unveiled a sunflower logo she said represents her run: her children, she said, want a city that is both “beautiful” and “bold and modern.”

Stintz promised to employ a “fresh new approach” and abandon “the old politics of the past.” Proposals to sell Hydro, however, have been raised and rejected before. In 2010, Rocco Rossi launched his unsuccessful candidacy by proposing a sale; in 2012, Mayor Rob Ford’s executive committee deferred a plan to sell 10 per cent.

Stintz said the details of her own proposal will be released later, in her platform. She said, however, that a lease would create “much more value” than a sale.

Stintz wants to build a downtown relief subway line, which could cost more than $7 billion. She said her Hydro plan is “one of the ways” the line could be funded without new taxes. Experts have valued Hydro at less than $2 billion, meaning a 10 per cent sale would be unlikely to cover a major chunk of the subway cost.

City-owned Toronto Hydro contributed $48 million in 2013and $33 million in 2012 to the city budget. Stintz would probably face a steep challenge to sell her idea at city council, which in 2011 voted 30-6 for a motion that said “it is not in the public interest to sell all or any part of it.”

Stintz is one of three candidates on the centre-right. Tory, the former Progressive Conservative leader and Rogers Cable chief executive, did not explicitly reject the proposal, but spoke negatively of it.

“As a businessman, I’m very wary of asset fire sales. I would view the proposed sale of Toronto Hydro in that context,” he said in an email via his spokeswoman.

Candidate David Soknacki, the city’s former budget chief, said he advocated a Hydro share sale while serving on council. Leasing, he said, would merely “generate bureaucracy and complexity,” but a partial sale is “a fair idea.”

“That money can be used, in my opinion, for more productive uses, to advance city policy,” Soknacki said.

Sale proposals have usually been limited to 10 per cent of Hydro, because the city would take a tax hit if it sold a greater percentage to a non-government entity.

Tory dismissed the idea of a transportation czar. “I believe the mayor should be the number one person responsible for getting transit built,” he said. “I’ll be that mayor.”

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